Showing posts with label Mathematics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mathematics. Show all posts

Monday, 14 March 2011

Happy Pi Day!

In honour of Pi Day, here's a selection of the (many) musical tributes that have been written:

Lose Yourself (In the Digits) (lyrics here)

Mathematical Pi


Pi Day Carols

As well as attempts to play the music of Pi itself:

What Pi sounds like

A piece of Pi (violin)

Pi-ano

And, of course:

Kate Bush, 'Pi'

Wednesday, 28 April 2010

The Mathematician in Love

From William J. Macquorn Rankine, Songs and Fables (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1874): 3-6. Online here.

Friday, 6 February 2009

The Senior Wrangler to His Bride. Being a Mathematical Madrigal in the simplest form.

CHARMER, on a given straight line,
And which we will call B C,
Meeting at a common point A,
Draw the lines A C, A B.
But, my sweetest, so arrange it
That they’re equal, all the three;
Then you’ll find that, in the sequel,
All their angles, too, are equal.

Equal angles, so to term them,
Each one opposite its brother!
Equal joys and equal sorrows,
Equal hopes, ‘twere sin to smother.
Equal – oh, divine extatics –
Based on HUTTON’s Mathematics!

Punch, September 4, 1858, p. 95

Mathematics

Mathematics is a difficult thing
I never understood what was the missing link
And by the time I calculated the correct solution
The question had escaped me and so did the conclusion

So tell me everything must always equal two
Or nothing else is true
And I'll believe you
Cos your X is equal to my Y
But equations pass me by

So will you take just a little of my mind and subtract it from my soul
Add a fraction of your half and you'll see it makes me whole
Multiply it by the times that we've never been apart
You'll see nothing can divide just a heart plus a heart

A little of my mind
Take it from my soul
A fraction of your half
See it makes me whole
And multiply the times
Never be apart
Cos nothing can divide a heart plus a heart

Don't know my Fibonacci or Pythagoras
But the only formula I know will work for us is that
When we're together in the sum of our parts
It's far greater than what we added up to at the start

So tell me everything must always equal two
Or nothing else is true
And I'll believe you
Cos your X is equal to my Y
But equations pass me by

So will you take just a little of my mind and subtract it from my soul
Add a fraction of your half and you'll see it makes me whole
Multiply it by the times that we've never been apart
You'll see nothing can divide just a heart plus a heart

A little of my mind
Take it from my soul
A fraction of your half
See it makes me whole
And multiply the times
Never be apart
Cos nothing can divide a heart plus a heart

A heart plus a heart

Take just a little of my mind and subtract it from my soul
Add a fraction of your half and you'll see it makes me whole
Multiply it by the times that we've never been apart
You'll see nothing can divide just a heart plus a heart

A little of my mind
Take it from my soul
A fraction of your half
See it makes me whole
And multiply the times
Never be apart
Cos nothing can divide a heart plus a heart

((c) Little Boots 2008)